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Beeing on a shitty tourist hotel internet line at the moment, I'm having trouble seeing your updates but I went to your website and saw them there. Despite the gloomy afternoon light , they look fantastic. I'm sure you've tried googling RN catapult trollies in general, I'm sure they must have looked quite similar from ship to ship within the Navy, battleships cruisers and even convoy ships launching hurricanes on one way missions??

I initially thought they would have been pretty much the same - at least for the ships equipped with Walruses (so that's Queen Elizabeth and Warspite, and various cruisers, besides the KGVs). Nope. They all used a different design of catapult, and a different design of trolley. I did eventually find one shot of the trolley from a cruiser that looked like it was essentially the top third of the trolley base (so everything from the top down to the beginning of the sloped fore and aft faces), which was enough to give me a clue as to the internal structure of it.

Some of the areas I couldn't make out I have been able to determine via a reverse-engineering approach. It's fairly clear how certain aspects of it are supposed to work, ie how they interract with other aspects of the catapult, so you can work back from that and fill in some of the blanks a little.

I'm currently unwrapping the rails (trolley is already done). After that I am going to start some proper work on the hull textures

I started the hull normal map from scratch, as it wasn't accurate and also not big enough to support rivets. These ships had fully rivetted hulls, so there are a lot of rivets. They look about right, I think. Dealt with the hull plating etc. This is all a simple side projection, so there was a bit of 3D painting required to get the apparently straight lines correctly curved towards bow and stern I did try unwrapping the hull, but to be honest, although it eliminated pixel distortion in a few areas, it just introduces a whole boat load of distortion that I don't want, so side projection wins.

The hull is somewhat darker than previously. I've been digging into the colour scheme a little. There are two admiralty paint codes that for years people have said were different shades - a dark and medium grey. Turns out they are the same shade (dark), the only difference being the presence of enamel (more expensive, harder wearing paint, and glossier). So this ship should be painted in the duller, cheaper version. I've made it too dull here, but I'll work on that more when I start weathering it.

The real 'fun' when it comes to colours comes when I start painting Prince of Wales' camo scheme. Loads of arguments about that one haha.

That's the degaussing cable. The other four ships had them fitted internally, and KGV's was refitted internally after the collision with HMS Punjabi, which caused a lot of bow damage (and sunk the destroyer).

I think most of the Japanese ships carried their degaussing cables externally - I know Yamato and Musashi certainly did.